Christians Celebrate Festival of Mass Baptisms With Water Balloon Fights

July 18, 2004

Source: Knight Ridder

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9185734.htm

On July 18, 2004 Knight Ridder reported, "Sunday was an Assyrian Christian festival commemorating mass baptisms by Jesus and the apostles. Iraq's approximately 180,000 Assyrians and a large number of their Muslim neighbors celebrate the festival, called Nusardil, by splashing, if not dousing, each other with water. Many children and young adults use the occasion to mount high-spirited water wars. In the Assyrian quarter of one neighborhood, 10-year-old Skiva Kamel, an Assyrian, and 13-year-old Osama Leewa, a Muslim, had been eagerly awaiting Sunday. They awoke at 6 a.m. to build an arsenal of 200 water balloons made from small plastic bags...For many others, though, post-war crime and terrorism kept the Nusardil festival more subdued this year. In past years virtually entire Assyrian neighborhoods would hit the streets armed not only with water balloons but waterlogged sponges, water-filled plastic bottles and water bombs made of plastic shopping bags. Recent attacks on liquor stores, almost exclusively owned by Christians because they were the only people Saddam Hussein licensed to sell alcohol, also have made some Assyrians uneasy about venturing outside. 'We can't celebrate in the street because of the situation,' said Gewargis Sliwa, archbishop of the Church of the East in Iraq. But he said the liquor store attacks were the work of Muslim extremists upset at the sale of alcohol and did not specifically target Christians."